I write about the Internet technologies and upstarts that are disrupting advertising and media faster than ever. I'm living this disruption, so I might as well write about it, too. I spent nine years as chief of BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau writing about the leading edge of technology and business, and I continue to do so for a variety of publications. Follow my posts here by clicking the "+ Follow" link under my name. You can also find me at my personal Web site RobHof.com, follow me on Twitter (robhof), Circle me on Google+, subscribe to me on Facebook, and email me (robert.hof@gmail.com).

Brand marketers know the Internet hasn’t ever been very good at helping them tell the stories they’re adept at telling in print and television advertising. Search ads and most display ads are fine for prompting people to make an immediate transaction, but there’s really not much online to compete with the brand-building power of good magazine or TV ads.

With the long-awaited debut today of its Flipboard knockoff“personalized living magazine” Livestand, Yahoo joins a long list of Internet companies hoping to change that, in particular on tablets such as the iPad that offer an experience at once more like TV and magazines than the personal computer has ever been. “The ad model we’ve been living with on the PC Internet for the past 15 years is just broken,” Blake Irving, Yahoo’s chief product officer, told me after the struggling company’s annual Product Runway today, where it launched Livestand and three other new products. “It’s been terrible for brands.”

Of course, we’re talking about an ad model that Yahoo helped pioneer, but let’s not get too snarky. Yahoo is pinning its hopes of changing that model on what it’s calling Living Ads, which it started talking about a month ago. Partly because these ads, which appear as a page on Livestand much like a magazine page or as an ad in the righthand column that can be expanded, use the new Web programming standard HTML5, they can act more like apps. So you can click or hover or part of the ad to find out more information about a product pictured, or even, say, play a song on a turntable in the ad.

“We wanted to embody the beauty of magazine advertising,” Alex Linde, who runs mobile and tablet ad products for Yahoo, told me. “We want the brand impact of TV, in a magazine format.”

Another advantage for advertisers, Linde says, is that data on how people interact with the Live Ads will be fed back to the advertisers, so they will be able to tell which parts of the ad most resonated. In fact, he envisions agencies creating two- or three-minute Live Ads that then, with feedback on what parts of the ad people most respond to, can be edited into standard 30-second TV ads. That would certainly be a reversal of the usual tactic of simply repurposing TV ads online as a video display ad or a YouTube pre-roll.

For now, Yahoo is selling Living Ads only as a sponsorship–for as much as $500,000 for a package that would run through the first quarter of 2011, according to Advertising Age. “Where advertising is going on these devices is more focused on engagement,” Irving says, which means clicks will not be the right measure of success. But Linde sees a more conventional CPM (cost per thousand views) model emerging eventually.

Toyota will be the first Live Ads advertiser, for the Prius, followed by one for Dreamworks Pictures’ movie War Horse, but Linde says other brands are planning to run Live Ads too. Although he says agencies have been enthusiastic about the ads, it won’t necessarily be an easy sell to marketers. “The challenge of a lot of these interactive ads is how the pricing will work,” says Gartner analyst Michael McGuire.

Of course, all this depends on whether Livestand succeeds, and that’s far from a sure thing, especially given the buzz Flipboard has already gotten and that Google’s coming entry as early as this week surely will, at least initially. But whether or not Yahoo’s Living Ads end up catching marketers’ fancy, it’s a good bet that something like them will be yet another piece of the puzzle for getting marketers to move more of their ad budgets online.

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